Civil War Dbq

The Civil War considered as part of nation-building flourishing worldwide in the mid of the nineteenth century and the peoples national identity was often accomplished by force of arms. The search for national identity was also extended to North America as the Civil War in 1861 to 1865 can be seen as an effort to establish a nation. This was to determine what kind of nation the United States would be (Herring, 2011). Prior to the Civil War, an era of tremendous growth in the mid-19th century had widened the split between north and south. People began to put their interests of their section above the interests of the nation as a whole and this has led to a struggle between the two sections of the country in the Civil War. The North fought offensively

with the aim of preserving the Union and freeing the slaves while the South fought on defensively with the aim of independence for the Confederacy (Unger, 1982). Irwin Unger (1982) stated, “The Civil War was a military contest, a confrontation of two economies, an ideological battle, and a war between two state departments, two congresses, and two chief executives.” In assessing the developments that led to the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, this essay would thus assemble from the least political developments to the most significant economic and social developments.
In the 1850’s, American politics were marked by sectional differences and the spread of slavery became linked with almost every political decision and event.

There were a number of efforts made to find some form of compromise between the two sections. Nonetheless, these efforts and the growing sectionalism only increase tension and the possibility of open warfare. Added to this was the political turmoil in the 1860 presidential election. Thus, one of the political development that led to the Civil War was a rift between the states and the federal government. The Constitution of the United States sets up a federal system of government in which the power was shared by the national and state governments (Linden et al., 1986). As the control of the federal government was slipping away, the south switched to a states’ rights argument to protect slavery through the tenth amendment of the Bill of Rights, claiming that the federal government was prohibited from intruding the right of slaveholders to take their slaves into a new territory and also not permitted to interfere with slavery in the states. With that southern politicians desired to defend slavery by retaining control of the federal government and a series of compromise take place when a new states were added to the Union in order to sustain the balance of power in the senate (Linden et al., 1986). However, the balance was finally

disrupted
3
in 1850 as the southerners permitted California to enter as a free state in exchange for laws strengthening slavery known as the Fugitive Slave Act and the territories of New Mexico and Utah that carved from Mexico to be decided by “popular sovereignty”. Nonetheless, the issue of slavery rise again with the Kansas-Nebraska Act as the southerners wanted to make Kansas a slave state, while northerners wanted to make it a free state which led to violence in ‘Bleeding Kansas’(Blum et al., 1981).
As tension rose, the abolitionist or anti-slavery movement had gone into the politics and begun to polarize the country.

The abolitionist growth in the 1830s, became another political development that led to the civil war. It was an outgrowth of religious revivalism preaching about the sinfulness of owning and mistreating other human being and southerners regarded the abolitionist as a direct threat to their way of life. Even though it was not supported by the northerners, it still increased bitterness between the North and South (James, 2003). An example of this abolitionist was John Brown, who in 1859 raided a federal arsenal in Virginia and arm slaves throughout the South and led a massive slave insurrection which fears the southerners of abolitionist growth (Linden et al., 1986). Besides that, the election of Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election was also the political development that led to the civil war. As a member of the Republican Party of the North and became the president of the United States, the Southerners felt that his victory in the election had ended their struggle in safeguarding their way of life. The southerners also view him as an abolitionist, as he gains his support from a wide range of anti-slavery northerners such as anti-slavery Whigs, ‘free soil’ advocates, and members of the Know-Nothing Movement as well as others who viewed slavery as an obstacle to economic development. As a result, the South felt threatened by a new President and

in direct response to Abraham Lincoln victory, seven southern states seceded from the Union decided to join together to form a new country (Blum et al., 1981).